Messages - dopey

Everything that you want to do, is possible, and those of us who can help, will help point you in the direction you need to go. Feel free to stop by #linuxmce-devel on freenode IRC.

You will need to study DCE devices, how they work, and build your own simple DCE device (see Developing a DCE device), so you can understand the interaction.

Once this is done, you'll need to study the interaction of Plugins with the DCE router, as you'll need to understand this, for handling the MediaStream object and its friends.

Once you understand this, you can then look at the MythTV Player, and see how it interacts with the existing mythTV, you can choose to keep this mechanism, or embed libMyth into MythTV Player (in actuality, the first version of MythTV literally embedded libmyth directly.)

Do you have the patience?

-Thom

I'm familiar with the DCE router and how it works. I spent many hours (and a lot of money) on LinuxMCE back when it was first starting out, and got a good amount of experience in that. I would have needed to study up on the plugins though. I'm also fairly familiar with mythfrontend, namely with theming and remote control. When I was still considering this project I was thinking that the majority of the work would be in the theme.

This certainly would have been a large project and taken the majority of time for a while, but I was ready for it... wouldn't be the first nor the last large dev project I took on.

BUT, after getting that initial response, I started remembering why I left the LinuxMCE community years ago. I then did a search to get up to speed with the recent events of LinuxMCE... and found Hari even started his own system, because he got so fed up. That put the final nail in the coffin for me. I haven't even thought to rechecked this post until now... just because I can't sleep and got curious.

LinuxMCE is a wonderful concept, but led by some close minded and rude developers. That just makes for an environment that I don't particularly want to work in... especially for free. I'm not aiming that at you, Thom; you've done a lot for LinuxMCE, and it's users, when I was around; and likely have continued to do so.

Of course, like Hari, I still need a Smart Home Automation system. If anyone's interested, I'm currently donating my dev time to Pytomation. But there are a lot of home automation systems out there. I'm still considering Home Genie (looks like some Pluto devs made that), but I like how easy Pytomation made it to create new interfaces and devices, and add custom code.

First, let me start off saying I'm not trying to start a "this app is better" argument. That does not belong in this thread.

I'm coming back to this project, after being absent for a number of years. Now I'm considering making some changes, but curious as to what others think of that direction I'm considering. I'm especially curious if anyone else has thought of or starting doing this before.

Also, if anyone can help point me to "areas of interest" for me to study and read, I'd much appreciate it. Right now, the design I'm about to go over is a concept only and I've only just begun looking at what it would entail to accomplish... I haven't even setup my LMCE dev VM yet.

Throughout the years of this project (how wonderful is it that I can say that) the one thing that annoyed me the most is the Myth TV integration with LinuxMCE. To watch Live TV you had to wait for this behemoth of an app to load, and LMCE's connection to Myth has been finicky at best. Plus, you have to consider, it takes some much time for Myth to load, because it's loading a lot of the stuff LinuxMCE is already handling.

When I first started looking at LinuxMCE, the Myth Internal Player was still new and often overridden on purpose, but that's not true anymore. That internal player can now run circles around the Xine player that LinuxMCE uses by default, plus MythUI allows you to spawn/overlay video windows wherever you want, display pictures, play audio, etc.

It then occurred to me that MythTV is actually very feature complete; and would have everything a HA system needs or would ever want, if only Myth had a plugin for a LMCE Orbiter, inside MythTV itself; and MythTV acted as the MD. Then Mythfrontend (or perhaps a separate app that utilizes the MythUI API) would be opened when ObiterGL is called. Myth would then be responsible for handling all audio, video, and text notifications (Myth already has this functionality); and sending/responding to commands to/from the DCERouter (what it seems mainly needs to be added).

Doing this would replace the picture viewer, Xine, and gallery devices; so MythTV would handle all commands previously sent to those devices. I think this is probably the main area that I would need to study up on first.

Before I even start going down this route, does anyone see any political issues that would cause me problems (such as licensing, rival devs, etc.)? This does sound like it would take a considerable amount of time, so I want to be reasonably sure I'm not going to be stopped halfway. I'm also hoping there's other developer interest in doing something like this.

I just want to add that the picture quality can be improved on an analog capture card by moving the card further away from the video card (the video card creates interference) and making sure everything is properly grounded. Most of the other tweaks danielk already mentioned.

I actually write in .NET a lot for my paying job (it pays the bills), but I've never attempted to develop .NET on Linux and wouldn't really know how to compile it let alone debug it... that's why I didn't respond...

I assume you're using Novell's implementation of .NET to compile (I can't for the life of me remember the name of project), is that correct?

System.Windows.Forms is a pretty basic forms class used only for basic GUI. Most, if not all, .NET projects reference more than that. Your actually problem can also depend on the version of .NET it was supposed to be compiled against as well...

I have come across many differnt bugs in Microsoft's implementation of .NET that I had to workaround by directly implementing the Windows API... you may want to check that the project doesn't attempt to do that (you wouldn't receive compile errors if the it only implements the Windows API based on the OS it's being compiled against using the interpreter)... but again I'm talking Windows and I'm not sure what impact that would have when trying to compile on Linux...

I don't know the exact requirements, but I've successfully ran UI2 on some rather old cards, including a Geforce 4. So I'm sure you'll be fine, it just may take a little bit of elbow grease. UI2 just uses OpenGL and requires hardware acceleration. However, the transparency requires a more powerful card.

Should be just fine for regular SD and DVD recordings. I wouldn't try to play any HD recordings off of that though. Also your video card is kind of old. You may have to downgrade (yes, I said downgrade) your nvidia drivers in order to get that working. I'm not sure if LinuxMCE does that for you or not... I've never tried. With the proper version of the drivers it should run UI2, but don't try to run it with overlay.

Using an S-Video to RCA adapter is probably your best bet.

Since your doing regular SD recordings only (you only have an SD TV anyhow) a cheap WinTV PVR-150 would do the trick. You should know that you won't be able to record analog over the air for long and will need a separate box to convert the digital signal to analog in the future.

The only thing you were missing was the cable to connect to your tv... and well the home automation stuff...

I can see the benefit of having an 8x card if you plan on doing some serious 3D gaming on your MD (I've run C&C 3 on my Hybrid). If you're not looking for gaming then there really isn't a point in using the more expensive card as LinuxMCE itself doesn't use the extra horsepower.

The 8x cards actually work just fine. I believe the AVWizard sets it to use the nv driver instead of the nvidia driver, however. If you edit xorg.conf file to use the nvidia driver instead and make sure you set the proper output if you device has multiple outputs, you'll be fine... Until this (really minor) problem is fixed I wouldn't recommend anyone who doesn't want to get there hands dirty to use a new card...

Now that doesn't mean your TV is compatible with whatever mode you are trying to throw at it... This is actually the major cause of most issues, even with the people using the 8x cards. Editing modelines to use nonstandard timings so a specific TV (that uses non-standard timings) can run a higher resolution is much more complicated than changing from the nv driver to nvidia...

I have one too, but have very little hope on getting this to work as a MD. Space is the main issue, plus it's very slow. In fact there is so little space they are now issuing free CF card upgrades so the new firmware (they are moving to QT) can load on it. It will work well for a small SD (don't even try HD) media player/recorder and I guess it is possible to get LMCE to control and use it, but there are far better options for a MD.

What resolution you choose largely depends on exactly which TV you connect to. Also many TV's have an issue with overscan. Do a search for modeline's and overscan in the forums and it should help you out.

This could be many things, but my guess it's the Ushare bug I reported in Mantis. If you have recursive links in a location that Ushare scans for new media, it eats all memory, including swap, and effectively kills the computer. Try killing ushare immediatly (and I mean quick) after boot and then rename the ushare executable.

FYI, as the bug reports mentions, this bug is fixed in SVN and so it won't be a problem in the next release. The fix is actually removing ushare altogether and replacing it with fuppes. I've never used fuppes as I didn't even know it existed... I normally use MediaTomb, but fuppes looks promising!

The problems discussed didn't really relate to the video card, but rather the TV. That video card actually runs very well in Linux.

The only video card issue is that was discussed is a universal problem. Currently LMCE hardcodes which DVI port to use and has hardcoded modelines that don't work with all TVs. I have to put in a manually created modeline for my TV (the TV won't report the correct timings, either). For my other TV I must turn on EDID (actually on by default, but LMCE disables it) and remove the LMCE modeline.

FYI, if LMCE didn't hardcode which DVI port to use in Xorg.conf, Xorg and the nVidia drivers would select whichever port was currently active.

No one answered because the answer is already in the forums. WM5 isn't supported well. There have been reported issues with specific phones. Of course it wouldn't hurt to try. You'll find the download link for all the old orbiters on the login page of the admin site. If memory serves, however, that orbiter is for WM3. Microsoft says WM5 is backwards compatible... but really you'll have better luck on a WM6 phone... believe it or not...

I've always had issues with those pcHDTV cards... I own two of them and don't use either. The HDHomeRun is your best bet, it just works and has two tuners that supports both ATSC and QAM. NTSC is analog, which the pvr-x50 cards work will with.